Professor Alasdair Nisbet’s team at the Moredun Research Institute developed in vitro and ‘on-hen’ systems to study poultry red mites, leading to welfare improvements and reducing the number of birds used in field trials. The 'on-hen' device is now used in labs in Spain, France, and China.
Dr Stuart Ainsworth’s team have developed and characterised a refined mouse model for testing antivenom efficacy that significantly reduces animal suffering by using lower venom doses, improved humane endpoints, and real-time biomarker monitoring.
With joint CRUK-NC3Rs funding, Dr David Fernandez Antoran’s 3D epithelioid culture model has been adopted by multiple labs globally, replacing animal use in different areas of oncology research, including oesophageal, tracheal, skin, ovarian and bladder cancer, as well as in radiotherapy studies and tissue regeneration research.
Over the last fourteen years, Dr Meri Huch has built a career developing organoids to study human organs in health and disease. This includes developing the first human liver organoids for preclinical research, most notably enabling liver cancer to be studied in vitro.
The research team of Professors Bazbek Davletov and Andrew Peden, long-term collaborators at the University of Sheffield, have developed in vitro, cell-based assays for replacing animal testing in the manufacture of clostridial toxin-based medical products.
With a decade of NC3Rs funding, scientists at the University of Birmingham have developed the first mature bone organotypic model, then systematically adapted and modified it to replace the use of rodents across a range of therapeutic areas involving the study of bone growth and regeneration.
Professor Anthony Chalmers and Co-Investigator Dr Natividad Gomez-Roman have further developed a 3D human cell culture model replacing the use of mice to evaluate and screen treatments for Glioblastoma (GBM).
Dr Alan Harper and NC3Rs-BHF PhD student Jacob Ranjbar have developed an artificial human blood vessel to study blood clotting in vitro and replace the use of mice in thrombosis research. They have successfully disseminated the model to the thrombosis community, including for new applications within cardiovascular research.
Dr Frank McCaughan and student, Dr Phil Barry, miniaturised a human cell-based model of early-stage lung cancer enabling the assay to replace some drug screening experiments using mice.
Professor Cathy Merry has developed synthetic hydrogels that support 3D culture for multiple cell types and used NC3Rs funding to support their application across multiple scientific disciplines.
Dr Karl Butterworth and PhD Student Dr Kathryn Brown have applied high precision cancer radiotherapy techniques used to treat human patients to improve the reproducibility and translatability of preclinical animal trials.
Dr Paola Campagnolo has used NC3Rs funding from a Project grant and a Skills and Knowledge Transfer award to develop an ex vivo model of the epicardium to replace the use of mice for high throughput screening of cardiac therapies in academia and industry.
